I was honored to present my ideas about Ubuntu & Debian at Debconf 7, with a number of Ubuntu and Debian developers present, including Mark (first time I saw him in person) and DPL Sam Hocevar. There was no slide projector, so I had to read my slides, even though everyone says you shouldn’t do that… 🙂
I was very impressed with the quality of the people at Debconf. I met lots of smart geeks, and even several anthropologists who study Debian as a social organization. You do not ship an operating system by accident, just as you don’t build an airplane by accident.
Here are my slides.
Here is a link to all of the Debconf 7 videos.
Here is a link to my talk, and the subsequent discussion.
A couple of thoughts from the discussion after the slides:
One of the big pieces of confusion is that Mark believes that publishing patches in multiple / granular formats is helpful to Debian. Lars Risan, who had a beer with Mark after my talk said that Mark strongly disagreed with my analogy of throwing code over the wall and that Ubuntu is doing everything technically possible to make its changes available to Debian. However, a major point in my talk is that throwing patches over the wall is not helpful because the person on the other side needs to get up to speed on the patch. You can’t just hand someone 100s or 1000s of lines of code because that person will have to take time to learn what is going on (to integrate them, fix any problems, etc.) and this takes a lot of time, perhaps as much time as if the Ubuntu patch doesn’t exist. This is why it took Debian many months to integrate modular X even though it had Ubuntu’s patches. Because it takes so much time, Ubuntu’s patches in practical terms are not helpful to Debian. The format, frequency, etc. of the patches doesn’t matter, it is the time to learn something which is the cost. If two people in different teams are each learning the same thing, they are not “standing on the shoulders of giants” but re-inventing and re-learning from scratch, just like the old, dark proprietary software days. I believe that, even though I spent some minutes on this topic, Mark did not understand this concept. Perhaps he would disagree with the scope of the problem, etc., but he would need to understand it first to disagree with it.
One of the points in my talk is that Ubuntu is exploiting a loophole in the GPL. You can of course fork code and do with it what you want, but that the spirit of GPL is to cooperate, work in the same codebase, and to fork only under extreme circumstances. Two examples I cited are the Linux kernel and Wikipedia. Jonathan Riddell has responded that Ubuntu is not exploiting a loophole in the GPL because he disagrees that there is only one Wikipedia and one Linux kernel. However, he doesn’t explain what he means. Perhaps he thinks there are multiple Linux kernels because each distro ships their own. Along these lines, Mark at one point responded to my point that there is only one kernel by asking: “Which one is that, the Red Hat kernel?” Only if Ubuntu had at least considered using the Red Hat kernel would his answer have been a substantive rebuttal. The larger point is that the various distro kernels differ from the mainline kernels mostly because they contain backports of fixes from the mainline kernel and other minor tweaks. These changes are very small in nature compared to the chasm of the separate buglist, greatly divergent code, etc. which exist between Ubuntu and Debian. Maybe I should have said that there is “one Linux kernel and Wikipedia team.” However, I see these statements as largely synonymous.
One of the points I made is that Ubuntu did not show up to Debconf with a list of workitems for Debian: Ubuntu takes whatever they can get from Debian, but any Debian limitations they just fix on their own. Mark responded by saying that the idea that Ubuntu should demand a list of workitems from Debian is a misunderstanding of the way free software works. However, I believe he is nitpicking my choice of the word “workitems.” My point is that much of the design and feature work that happens in Ubuntu is going on in a separate community/world. If the cross-organizational collaboration was healthy, Ubuntu would come to Debconf with a list of things like: “One of Ubuntu’s biggest problems is (x). How can we work together on this problem?” This doesn’t happen because Ubuntu is attacking problems on their own, without the deep and rich consultation if the communities were together. And, another downside of this situation is that the center of gravity on a number of areas is moving away from Debian.
Mark believes that Ubuntu is good for Debian, because so many people use apt-get. This is a bad way of measuring “good.” What about quantifiable metrics? Here is one: I would measure something as good for Debian if it increases the number of DDs. Anthony Towns told me here that the number of DDs has not dramatically increased in the last 3 years, and the number of new maintainers joining every year is even slightly decreasing. Therefore, this is one metric which demonstrates that Ubuntu has not been good for Debian. Mark says that he thinks it would be great if Debian had 10,000 DDs, but if the Debian userbase is not growing, how is it going to get there?!
Mark said that: “Ubuntu could have derived from Red Hat, SuSE, Gentoo…” However, Mark did not do this, and instead forked Debian and hired a number of its best developers. Furthermore, I also disagree with the premise that he needed to derive from any codebase at all. A major theme of my talk is that what makes Debian so great is that it supports many hardware platforms and contains many software packages, built to work together. Why could his improvements not be done directly into Debian, just like HP and many other companies and interests have done? Finally, if Mark thinks he could have had so much success deriving from any other distro, Debian is not the special thing he claims it to be.
A number of Debianites agreed with me on many aspects of these issues, but who have given up trying to convince Mark, etc. Several told me that they were worried about the center of gravity shifting away from Debian, for example. I believe a reasonable compromise to minimize the damage to the community is to let users use Ubuntu, but to encourage all developers to join Debian. I met someone working on MOTU games, and his group by themselves realized that doing their work directly in Debian was a better approach.
A final thought: if Debian took all of Ubuntu’s patches, which Mark would like Debian to do, and shipped on the same day, how would a user decide which distro to install?
What do you think? Post your comments below.
